Interactive virtual reality experiences are known in the art. Such experiences often make use of a multi-media presentation to present a context, such as a room or the like, within which the user can interact with animate and/or inanimate objects and/or other participants. Such experiences are often employed to facilitate an entertainment activity or to facilitate conferencing, event management, or the like.
In some cases, a participant in such an experience may find it useful or even necessary to participate in multiple such experiences in a quasi-parallel or rapidly successive manner. During a significant civic emergency, for example, a high ranking authority figure such as a mayor may wish or need to participate in various public safety interactive virtual reality experiences (as correspond, for example, to a police conference room, a fire fighters conference room, and so forth).
Prior art solutions provide techniques for moving from one such virtual setting to another in order to facilitate such successive participation by such an individual. In general, however, such solutions tend to either fully integrate the entire scope of the experience (and hence can consume large quantities of network bandwidth as well as remote and local computational capacity) or to treat such successive experiences in a discrete and fully independent manner (and hence can lead to undesired interruptions, delays, and reduced fluidity as the user moves from setting to setting).
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions and/or relative positioning of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of various embodiments of the present invention. Also, common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are often not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present invention. It will further be appreciated that certain actions and/or steps may be described or depicted in a particular order of occurrence while those skilled in the art will understand that such specificity with respect to sequence is not actually required. It will also be understood that the terms and expressions used herein have the ordinary meaning as is accorded to such terms and expressions with respect to their corresponding respective areas of inquiry and study except where specific meanings have otherwise been set forth herein.